In this notebook we will analyze the data of the omicron and delta variant to understand the current situation of the countries and to find the differences between these two variants.

Importing Libraries and Datasets

It's hard to understand the meaning of the variant "non_who" so we will ignore it.

Now we add a new column that will serve as an unique key for each row: this will be useful for filtering the data.

The last preprocessing step is to obtain the filtered dataset for the variants omicron and delta, while the rest of the variants will be contained in a third dataset.

How many omicron and delta variants have been sequenced for each date globally?

From the plot we can notice that:

At the end of the plot (end of 2021/ begin of 2022) it's possible to observe that for both variants we have very low num_sequences: we will investigate this behaviour later.

Let's plot the logarithmic version of the previous plot.

From this plot it's clear that the omicron variant spreads faster than the delta variant: as we can se, the omicron curve is very likely to be exponential.

At the end of the plot we observe the same behaviour we noticed before.

How many samples have been sequenced every date globally?

For each year, we can assert that:

However, in the date 2021/12/27 we can notice that the total number of sequence is half than the usual number the countries were able to reach in the last months, meanwhile the lowest peak, in this plot, is reached at the date 2022/01/05.

My interpretation for this behaviour is that the countries did less analysis because of Christmas holidays and/or the data is incomplete (for example, most of the countries didn't provide their latest data).

According to the last trustable data, how much are widely diffused the delta and the omicron variants?

Its clear that, if we analyze a random sample it's very likely that we find either the delta or the omicron variant in those countries: howerver, it's still possible to find other variants (as we will see soon).

Are there any differences in the diffusion of the variants in South Africa?

The omicron variant was first found in South Africa. Let's see some plots.

The delta variant, from May 2021 and September 2021, became the dominant variant. Instead, the omicron variant was able to be the most diffused variant just more than a month and two weeks!

At last we can also assert that other variants are still diffused: in the 2021/12/27 6.17% of the samples belonged to other variants.

The logarithmic version of the previous plot confirms the fact that the omicron variant is far more contagious than the delta one: the delta variant had a slow and "unsure" grow, meanwhile the omicron variant had a very fast and brave grow.

Are there any differences in the diffusion of the variants in India?

India is also an interesting country because it's where the delta variant was first found.

In India the Oimcron variant is not spreaded yet but we can notice how is taking the place of the delta variant in the month of december.

This plot it's very similar to the one of South Africa and the observations we did before are still possible for India.